The Storage Effect has moved to the newly expanded Seagate blog section of seagate.com.  Come visit me there and subscribe for any of the new Seagate blogs.

I’m also posting to a new blog at Seagate, focused specifically on IT storage called Inside IT Storage. 

Come join the conversations!

Visit Storage Effect at its new location 

I’m excited to be moving Storage Effect into better accommodations on seagate.com.  From now on, you can find Storage Effect at http://media.seagate.com/center/storage-effect .

It’s been a blast growing the blog “off the radar”.  But taking advantage of the Seagate infrastructure will free me to focus more on the blog content and less on the site.  

For you it means exposure to Seagate’s burgeoning blog scene.  I won’t spoil the surprise, but we’re not calling the page “Seagate Blogs” for nothing.  You’ll also have easier access to videos and other cool content being generated at Seagate.

Be sure to change your Storage Effect link or subscribe to my new RSS feed to stay connected.

See you there!

My url is changing, but not my blog

I’m excited to be moving Storage Effect into better accommodations on seagate.com.  From now on, you can find Storage Effect at http://media.seagate.com/center/storage-effect .

It’s been a blast growing the blog “off the radar”.  But taking advantage of the Seagate infrastructure will free me to focus more on the blog content and less on the site.  

For you it means exposure to Seagate’s burgeoning blog scene.  I won’t spoil the surprise, but we’re not calling the page “Seagate Blogs” for nothing.  You’ll also have easier access to videos and other cool content being generated at Seagate.

Be sure to change your Storage Effect link or subscribe to my new RSS feed to stay connected.

See you there!

Check it out at my new digs on seagate.com! 

Yes, I’m moving on up to a better place in the Mother Ship. 

Storage Effect’s location is changing, but not the content.  Expect to see more of the same, including the first installment of the continuing saga of my frozen Seagate FreeAgent Go portable drive. 

The new url is http://media.seagate.com/center/storage-effect . Be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed for the new page. 

Hope to see you there soon!

Storage will make the biggest impact of any technology in the 2010’s

Think I’m crazy?  Think again.

Information and energy drive today’s world.  The internet has re-invented life and work for the digitally enabled parts of the world, and the electrical grid and gas-powered transportation systems are what make our physical economy go round. 

Batteries and bytes will change the world

Storage is the prime enabler of both of these infrastructures. And storage innovations for both will revolutionize both of these infrastructures over the next few years.

Energy storage is better known as fuel. Conventional energy media - coal and gas – are finally giving way (partly) to more efficient media.  Notably, battery technology is at an inflection point, poised to transform automobiles and (yet again) information technology. 

The U.S. government is even considering a Sematech-like consortium to collectively catch up on battery manufacturing capability.

Information storage is also going through a media transition.  Solid state flash is finally ready to stand with disk drives and tape.  In the next decade, the new storage media ecosystem will transform personal and business computing in ways we can’t even know today. 

Information doesn’t get the headlines that software or processors or networking does, but none of these technologies would be usable without today’s storage technology.  More than ever before, information is the mother of all technology, and storage is where that information resides.

If storage isn’t a big enough part of your work life, how about bringing it home for the Holidays?

This enterprising chap turned 70 old SCSI disk drives into a one terabyte tannenbaum. 

If he had used today’s latest small form factor enterprise  SAS drives (like the 300GB Seagate Savvio), he would have would have had 21 terabytes to string with tinsel. 

Something to plan for next year, Philip?

Happy Holidays to Storage Effect readers wherever you are.  I wish you the very best in 2009.

You can live forever digitally for a “nominal price”.

Here’s another contributor to the growth of content in the world: information immortality. 

nEternity is offering to keep your digital life – photos, music, your blog – alive and available online forever – independent of your domain or the photo sharing service you’re using.

nEternity may or may not take off.  More significant is the trend it points towards: the extension of the lifetime of digital data.   Businesses will continue to lengthen their data’s life from here on. 

The rules for data retention are changing as digital copies are increasingly the only copies that exist.  This will create a new set of businesses focused on extending the life of digital records beyond the current technology on which they are stored.  It makes today’s digital archives look downright transitory. 

And you thought those backup tapes were troublesome…

BusinessWeek says it’s stylish, affordable, and simple to use

Simplicity stands out in BusinessWeek’s review of the Seagate FreeAgent Go.  So true! The biggest challenge with consumer technology in general remains its ability to be used by normal people. 

As digital content moves into every corner of our lives, the winning products will be those that meet us where we are, and don’t try to turn us all into techno geeks.

Bucking economic trends as recently as September

Storage Station noted that Gartner and IDC are seeing about 10% growth in storage revenue in the third quarter of 2008.  That’s pretty recent evidence that storage continues to resist macroeconomic momentum.

While it’s clearly not a boom time given the layoffs announced by EMC, Pillar, WD, Hutchinson and others, it’s a relatively positive trend.

These days we take what we can get.

Servers would give them the third leg of the data center “stool”

Chris Mellor interpreted Cisco’s recent body language around servers.  Will they jump into the server business? 

It’s not that much of a stretch.  It’s only fair, as HP and others don’t shy away from dabbling in Cisco’s networking space. 

And Cisco has already crossed into the storage realm.

Used to be that IT was all about processing.  Today servers, storage and networking are the three legs of the data center stool.  They’re the Mind, Stomach and Voice of the digital body of business.

The smartest of the big players in all three spaces will look for ways to corner them all.